Levinas's mature thought (i.e., works of 1961 and 1974) are descriptions of the encounter with another person. That encounter evinces a particular feature: the other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. I can constitute the other person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund Husserl's basic phenomenological approach to constituting other people within a shared social universe. These days we can partly rely on brain scans.
Levinas argues, the core element of intersubjective life is that the other person addresses me, calls to me. He does not even have to utter words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach. Levinas describes and approaches from multiple perspectives (e.g., internal and external). He will present it as fully as it is possible to introduce an affective event into everyday language without turning it into an intellectual theme. Beyond any other philosophical concerns, the fundamental intuition of Levinas's philosophy is the non- reciprocal relation of responsibility. In the mature thought this responsibility is transcendence par excellence and has a temporal dimension specific to it as human experience. So at least we should be able to talk about our experience. I rather dislike the word 'awareness' as it suggests a rather too immediate 'superiority' of the aware. The phenomenological descriptions of intersubjective responsibility are built upon an analysis of living in the world. An ‘I’ lives out its embodied existence according to modalities. It consumes the fruits of the world. It enjoys and suffers from the natural elements. It constructs shelters and dwellings. It carries on the social and economic transactions of its daily life. Yet, no event is as affectively disruptive for a consciousness holding sway in its world than the encounter with another person. In this encounter (even if it later becomes competitive or instrumental), the ‘I’ first experiences itself as called and liable to account for itself. It responds. The ‘I’'s response is as if to a nebulous command. Nothing says that the other gave a de facto command. The command or summons is part of the intrinsic relationality. With the response comes the beginning of language as dialogue. The origin of language is always response—a responding-to-another, that is, to her summons. Dialogue arises ultimately through that response. Herein lie the roots of intersubjectivity as lived immediacy. Levinas has better terms for it: responsibility is the affective, immediate experience of “transcendence” and “fraternity". The intersubjective origin of discourse and fraternity can only be reached by phenomenological description. Otherwise, it is deduced from principles that have long since been abstracted from the immediacy of the face-to-face encounter with the other. To situate first philosophy in the face-to-face encounter is to choose to begin philosophy not with the world, not with God, but with what will be argued to be the prime condition for human communication. The idea is to aside empirical prejudices about subjects and objects. This idea strips away accumulated layers of conceptualization, in order to reveal experience as it comes to light in the gaze of the other. This gaze is interrogative and imperative. It says “do not kill me.” It also implores the ‘I’, who eludes it only with difficulty, although this request may have actually no discursive content. This command and supplication occurs because human faces impact us as affective moments.. The face of the other is firstly expressiveness. It could be compared to a force. We must, of course, use everyday language to translate these affective interruptions. Suffice it to say that first philosophy is responsibility that unfolds into dialogical sociality. It is a way of defining transcendence in relation to the world and to what Heidegger called Being. I am not, myself taken with such philosophy, but I am with what it may mean for human communication.For it seems to me that bildung - for me great literature and science - leads one into a freezing moral climate, one experienced when I meet ADMASS - that point where 'I' can experience no transcendence but only sorrow. I have no problem with an actual village idiot - he may be an entertaining fellow - but the transcendent form is the smiling brotherhood of public pornography. What freezes is any thought of fraternity, for there is only membership I would reject. On Jun 24, 8:28 am, Georges Metanomski <zg...@yahoo.com> wrote: > epistemology@googlegroups.com > > S-S:> Also when it comes to words such as > > mind, awareness, experience, my > > instincts then lead (me) to aspects of time. One > > carries ones mind or > > objectives with them, inherited or pervasive perhaps as we > > "are" in relation > > to our cultural surroundings. One realises > > consciously and unconsciously moment by moment > > awareness. > > =============== > G: > Congratulations. It squares with fundamental postulates of Einstein's > "Physical Reality". We'll come back to it in more detail in the next > post D2 of the D thread planned to encompass: > > D1 Immanency and Transcendency > D2 Foundation of Reason > D3 Mind and Brain > D4 "Classic" and "Quantum" Physics > D5 Philosophy and Science > > Cheers > Georges. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
